by [email protected]
Long ago, a deal was formed to save the human race. This isn't that story. Four humans are chosen for an experiment. A sarcastic cashier. A businesswoman and her extremely unhelpful cat. An eighty-seven-year-old man. And a soldier who really should have stayed where his commanding officer could yell at him. None of them volunteered. None of them know why they were chosen. And none of them know where they've been taken. Their only apparent source of answers is an ancient tower standing beyond an abandoned village. Unfortunately, the tower has doors that shouldn't exist, an entrance that refuses to stay where they left it, and a rather questionable understanding of how time is supposed to work. Somewhere inside the Tower is an explanation for what is happening to them. Possibly. For now, they'd settle for finding a way home.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 08:09 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 08:09 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
10%
Two or more lists
6%
Likely threshold order: Comedy → Sci-fi → Mystery → Adventure → Main.
Leading bundle: Comedy (3%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#517 of 12,176 · 467 below RS #50
By genre
beats 25% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 17% of similar stories
Both levers trail the field
Traffic and conversion are both below comparable stories. Cadence is the first lever — stories posting near-daily reached 25 followers 17% of the time; stories posting every few days almost never did. Get the flow going, then re-check conversion.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 10–19 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.
